This is the blog of David M. Raab, marketing technology consultant and analyst. Mr. Raab is Principal at Raab Associates Inc. The blog is named for the Customer Experience Matrix, a tool to visualize marketing and operational interactions between a company and its customers.

The advice in the paper is reasonable, if fairly conventional: ensure sponsorship, articulate goals, identify important metrics, and so on. The paper also stresses the importance of having an underlying enterprise marketing system like, say, the one sold by Unica.

This is useful, so far as it goes. But it doesn't help with the real challenge of measurement projects, which is choosing metrics that support corporate strategies. So far, I haven’t come across a specific methodology for doing this. Most gurus seem to assume a flash of enlightenment will show each organization its own path. Perhaps organizations and strategies are all too different for any methodology to be more specific.

Relying on such insights suggests we have veered from Western rationalism to Eastern mysticism. I haven't yet seen a book "The Zen of Marketing Performance Measurement", but perhaps that's where we're headed.